Цитаты из книги «Книга непокоя», страница 10

There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort, given that we’re ruled by implacable laws, which nothing can repeal or obstruct. We may be slaves shackled to the whim of gods who are stronger than us, but they’re not any better, being subject – like us – to the iron hand of an abstract Fate, which is superior to justice and kindness, indifferent to good and evil.

And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and nonexistence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented, seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion – a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our faint-hearted love of freedom – which, if we had it, we would all reject, unable to get used to it – is proof of how ingrained our slavery is.

The world is a set of distinct things with varied edges, but if we’re near-sighted, it’s a continual and indecipherable fog.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writings that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in the shadows ..... I’ve written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that has acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a coverture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

Memories, Sundays, Masses, the pleasure of having been, the miracle of time having remained because it already went by, and since it was mine it will never be forgotten… Absurd diagonal of my normal sensations, sudden sound of an old carriage around the square, creaking its wheels in the depths of the cars’ noisy silences and somehow or other, by a maternal paradox of time, subsisting today, right here, between what I am and what I’ve lost, in my backward gaze that is me…

Yes, what I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been. And this crowd of strangers who are still leaving Mass, and the beginning of the potential crowd arriving for the next Mass, are like boats passing by on a slow river, beneath the open windows of my house on the bank.

When I was a child, I used to go to this Mass, or perhaps another one, but I think it was this one. I wore my only good suit, out of respect, and enjoyed every minute, even when there was nothing special to enjoy. I lived externally, and the suit was clean and new. What more can one want, when he’s going to die and doesn’t know it, led by a mother’s hand?I used to enjoy all of this, but only now do I realize how much I enjoyed it. I would enter Mass as into a great mystery, and come out at the end as into a clearing. And that’s how it really was, and how it still really is. It’s only the self who no longer believes and is now an adult, with a soul that remembers and weeps – only this self is fiction and confusion, anguish and the grave.

None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it's the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.